What Heather has learned about personal branding

This week’s posts are the last ones required by the emarketing course Colee, Robin and I (Heather) are enrolled in at Pacific Lutheran University. So we’ve decided to let you know what we’ve learned through this project and what tidbits we think are the most important for you to remember.

To start out with, I’ll provide a bit more background on my personal branding story. I started branding myself - without even knowing what to call it - about two years ago. Since then, I have managed my social media presences and created two different websites – one for my online portfolio and another for my photography business.

I’ll have to admit I have not managed my time well with personal branding these past couple years because I admittedly didn’t know what I was doing when I started, and did not create any guidelines for myself. Now that I’m graduating in three weeks – I have hopefully completely redesigned my personal brand for the last time. But I also know I have a long way to go in fully developing my personal brand.

Overall, that's what I’ve learned the most this semester – that if you plan your personal brand and take a little time at the beginning to create a standardized logo, colors, typography, and a general design, that will save you oodles of time in the long run. Take it from someone who learned it the hard way. You don’t want to be completely redesigning your website, resume and other materials as often as I have in the past two years.

For more on time management, check out this post on time-saving personal branding tips.